Executive Technology Leadership.

There’s an early growth phase that most successful companies go through, when you’re looking for investment or acquisition to take you to the next level, but your technology is still an evolution of the prototype that started the company.

Your developers are focused on extending the product to meet demand, but a frustrating amount effort is spent being reactive. It used to be easier to get stuff done, with fewer problems.

I help companies, in this exact position, make the course corrections required to proactively increase how attractive they are to investors. History is littered with incompatible acquisitions that resulted in the acquired technology being abandoned, so due diligence now includes a much deeper dive into how you make your particular sausage.

Your product might work well for your current customers, but an investor will dig deep to discover if you’re set up to scale efficiently. Ask your development team to describe the impact of your active user base increasing 100 fold, and watch the color drain from their faces. This is normal, because your technology is an evolution of the prototype you created to test the viability of your company.

When I join a company like yours, the first thing I do is read through your codebase. All of it. Every technology has some technical debt, the corners that you cut to get you up and running, and it’s my job to help identify the issues that will affect an evaluation. I work with your existing development team to address the core issues that are preventing you from working as fast as you used to.

As your core technology starts moving from prototype to enterprise, I help with your M&A talks providing executive level participation with a deep understanding of your technology, combined with the insight to reveal what the lovely people on the other side of the table are looking for.

The results are happier developers — because it becomes easier to ship robust code, happier customers — because your product better serves their needs, and a happier executive team — because less time is spent fighting fires, with investment facilitating real growth.

How confident are you about your technology? If I turned up to audit your codebase on behalf of an investor, what would I be reporting back to them?

If you’d like to know more about how this might be relevant to your company, send me a message and I’ll get right back to you.